The Elop and Ballmer duo on stage on February 11th was the main topic of discussion at this year’s Mobile World Congress. The reverberations of the Microsoft-Nokia announcement were felt even by the huge green robot tucked away at Google’s stand in Hall 8.

Following the news of the Nokia and Microsoft tie-up, Stephen Elop’s appointment to the helm of Nokia seems like an arranged marriage – and one whose best men were the carriers who wanted to avoid an all-out Android coup. It was also a marriage of desperation, which Elop memorably described in his memo as ‘jumping into the unknown’ from the ‘burning platform’ that is Symbian.

A marriage of desperation – Microsoft has been desperate to see its mobile business succeed. After a decade of lacklustre efforts at mobile device sales and severe product delays, Microsoft was getting desperate; it needed to stop the churn of Microsoft users to the Apple ecosystem and plug its $1 billion-a-year operational costs for its mobile phone business. Even having spent most of its $500M marketing budget for WP7 it had only got breadcrumbs in terms of sales, with Microsoft reporting 2 million shipments but no comment on sell-throughs (which leads us to suspect this was not more than 1 million of actual end-user sales).

Nokia has been desperate seeing its platform play fail spectacularly in comparison to its newfound competitors; Apple who had amassed a developer ecosystem and operator demand which was second to none, and Android who in 2 short years matched Nokia’s smartphone sales in Q4 2010. MeeGo was trumpeted as the big guns in Nokia’s arsenal in February 2010, but once again Nokia’s software R&D failed to deliver on the promise. More importantly, despite the 10+ acquisitions during 2007-2010, Nokia failed to amass a strong-enough developer and services ecosystem on Symbian, Java or Qt that could compete with Apple or Google. Like Elop said in his now-famous burning platform memo, “our competitors aren’t taking our market share with devices; they are taking our market share with an entire ecosystem”. Continue reading…

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2 Comments

Good move on the part of Microsoft! I have tested the Windows 7 phone. Very smooth when scrolling and great touch interface. I say the touch interface is second only to Apple at this time. Android should take notes on this one hahahaha!
I actually liked some of the Nokia phones. But I think to stay ahead this was a good move. They didn’t seem to put much behind the development of Symbian as other mobile OS companies have.
Check this to see what other developers have to say: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfWFvCJJaNs